All posts tagged ‘brooklyn’

Just as Hurricane Sandy came blowing into New York City, we hunkered down and watched an inspiring NY tale, Brooklyn Castle. Three generations of us, including me, my chess-playing 7-year-old daughter, and my mother-in-law, a former teacher, were riveted by this documentary about junior high chess champions.

Brooklyn Castle follows several of the students on the chess team of I.S. 318 in Brooklyn. This school, where 70% of the students live below the poverty line, has won more national chess titles than any other junior high school in the country. Director Katie Dellamaggiore started this film to document the chess phenomenon in this school, but, like any good documentary, it turned into so much more. As the school year progressed in the film, I.S. 318, like most of the public schools in our fair city, was saddled with crippling budget cuts as the economy crashed. At first, it looked like there wouldn’t be enough money to send the kids to their tournaments. By the end of the film you’re worried about the very chess team itself surviving.

For years, I was way too cool to tour New York City on a double-decker bus.

No matter how fun it looked, I was convinced that Gray Line’s double-deckers were for tourists with a capital T. Growing up just over the river in New Jersey, I didn’t want cool New Yorkers to think I was one of those gawping yokels who clogs the streets, walking too slowly and snapping photos every 16 feet.

On a recent visit to the city, however, two things occurred to me:

1) I am a tourist – no point in pretending I’m not. This goes double when traveling with a geekling who insists on documenting everything, even the morning walk to the bagel place, with his handheld video camera.

2) Once ensconced in the bus, you can gawp and take photos every 16 feet without inconveniencing speed-walking New Yorkers on the pavement.

I thought the double-decker would be a fun and novel way to see the city, and it would let our son, who had only been there once, get a feel for the different neighborhoods and sights. The hop-on, hop-off feature would allow us to disembark in Chinatown for some bargain hunting, venture into Little Italy for cannoli and ride back to our hotel on our own timetable. All that was true, but what I didn’t expect was the amazing New York trivia we learned from our tour guides. We left brimming with geeky facts that gave us a deeper understanding of the city.

A few examples:

To prove that the newly built Brooklyn Bridge was safe, P.T. Barnum led a parade of 21 elephants over its span in 1884.

New York was home to the first escalator, first elevator, and first department store.

For 250 years, before the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, it took an hour or more to sail between Manhattan and Brooklyn.

With more than 2.5 million people, Brooklyn is has almost as many residents as Chicago.

If all of New York’s subway tracks were laid out end to end, they’d stretch for 722 miles.

In terms of area, the Bronx is about the same size as Paris.

If you climbed from the lobby of the Empire State Building to the 86th floor observation deck, you’d go up 1,550 steps. I’ll take the elevator.

The largest park in New York City isn’t Central Park, but Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, which spans 2,765 acres. (Central Park comes in fifth, at 843 acres.)